#realtime tactics

[steamgameaday]

Star Wolves 3: Civil War (2010)

Genre: Realtime Tactics Developer: Elite Games Team Price: £19.99

As I began my job this evening, the six television screens in the display behind me immediately switched to a familiar sight. Between blue skies and white clouds a waistcoated man wielding some kind of magical ability rescued a woman clad in a long blue and white dress from a ferocious mob of bigots whilst a thrashy Nico Vega track played. It would seem that even my day job has started to mock my current inability to play Bioshock Infinite.

Instead I am stuck concentrating my time and effort on Star Wolves 3: Civil War, a space-based Realtime Tactics RPG in which you gather a team of adventurers and fight space pirates, fascists, corporates and aliens in a free-roaming RPG with multiple endings. On paper, in fact, Star Wolves 3 sounds brilliant. It might be brilliant in action, in fact, however, I wouldn't know because two hours in, the game was still dragging me around by the arm, telling me exactly what to do and where to go.

But then, there are plenty of games with slow starts that turn out before too long to be utterly excellent; Chrono Trigger for example. Perhaps Star Wolves 3 is one of those? Well, I wouldn't put too much hope into that, as whilst the game hasn't really let me do anything outside of it's basic remit so far, what it has shown me is that it's clunky interface and mechanics are poorly suited for a realtime game.

Trying to get the interface to acknowledge any sort of action, for example, tends to take multiple clicks before it will actually register properly. Sometimes the game assumes that you want to move to somewhere underneath an opponent rather than attack them, for example, or sometimes it will just act as if you haven't done anything and sit waiting for you to give it a command. Trying to move around on the game's 3D plane is even worse; telling your units to move anywhere that is a different height to where it's currently at involves a degree of guesswork as the move tool is of little to no help when it comes to the perception of depth.

It's not all bad though. The game looks quite nice, and can actually be stunningly pretty from time to time. The game seems to have a nice detailed universe that's much larger than it actually needs to be, and all of the various factions in the game have their own ship designs and appearances. It's just a shame that we have to experience it all the way we do, as a good 90% of the game seems to involve sitting around waiting for the player character's ship to move from one location to another.

Ultimately with a game like this I'd much rather that I'd have gotten a few more hours under my belt before passing judgment, but quite frankly, it was already starting to outstay it's welcome at just over two hours in. Star Wolves 3 is a fiddly, slow and occasionally badly translated game that doesn't quickly live up to it's concept.

How long did I play? - 2.3 hours. Did I finish it? - No Would I finish it? - No

[steamgameaday]

Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty (1999)

Developer: Pyro Studio Genre: Realtime Tactics Price: £3.99

Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty is apparently a standalone expansion to the similarly titled Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, and with it's ugly as sin textures and laughably silly looking UI appears to be a vestige of the bad old days of gaming. Which it is, in every sense of the term.

After 25 minutes of completely non-interactive tutorials narrated by the world's most cheery englishman, I got the basic grasp of things. The concept seemed simple enough; a team of individually-controlled specialists sneak around Nazi installments taking out guards and completing objectives. The team included a Heavy (or Green Beret) who specialised in close combat, a sniper with a limited ammo cache, a Royal Marine with the ability to dive and pilot dinghies, A sapper with explosives and beartraps, a Driver with the ability to use any ingame vehicle, and a spy who could take enemy uniforms and make silent attacks. So far, so much potential for strategy. A quick test of skills in a training sandbox made me confident that I understood the game enough to try out the campaign.

Loading up the game for real, I was presented with an FMV of suitably Nazi-filled newsreels, plot exposition, and a mission briefing. The game then dumped me on a small dinghy just off of the island of Guernsey.

Paddling the dinghy round the rocks I was immediately spotted by a mounted gunner on the docks and my team and their boat were peppered with bullets and ripped to shreds. Fair enough, I thought, that was a pretty stupid move on my part. And I pressed 'restart mission'.

The FMV began to replay, and I franticly searched around for a button to skip it (Esc, naturally) and begin the mission once more. This time I took it slower, moving the boat around the side of the rocks carefully and putting it into a safe position so that I could carefully consider my next move.

Then the alarm went off. 

Looking at the green line of sight diagram, the game was telling me that the person who spotted me either didn't exist or was inside the island itself. Realising that the lines of sight diagrams only worked in 2 dimensions whilst the actual lines of sight worked in 3, I figured out that a previously unforeseen guard on the top of the lighthouse. Fair enough.

So restart mission, skip FMV, skip exposition, skip mission briefing.

I position myself closer to the lighthouse, and have my sniper set up a shot. The scope shows up red; no line of sight between the boat and the guard. I prepare to move in closer, when suddenly, the alarm goes off.

Wait, what?

The guard, whom my sniper does not have a line of fire towards, is firing quite easily at my dinghy with his standard rifle, quickly and easily dispatching my team. 

This seemed somewhat unfair.

So I restarted the mission, skipped the FMV, skipped the exposition, skipped the mission briefing and tried again. 

Positioning myself in a slightly different but similar position to the previous attempt, I successfully sniped the man on the highest tower and carefully took myself down towards the dock again, this time hiding directly behind a rock. Again, there was no line of sight; the sniper's scope showed up red when placed on the guards on the dock.

Naturally, I was spotted almost instantly.

Despite the fact that I was just barely in sniping distance from the dock, that the line of fire was blocked, and that no alarm had been set off to make the guards search for me, my dinghy was once again shredded to pieces almost instantly (need I remind you, through a rock) and the mission was once again failed.

Sod it, I thought. Whilst conserving sniper fire is a pretty important approach to the game, there just didn't seem to be any other way through. I restarted the level, skipped the FMV, skipped the exposition, skipped the mission briefing and moved into action. Swiftly I sniped the man on the tower before I could be noticed, then took out the two men on the dock before they could raise an alarm. At last, a foothold! Moving my dinghy into the dock, the alarm went off. The dead bodies had been discovered by a roaming patrol which served as my firing squad. The team were dead immediately.

This was the first level, and this was on 'easy' difficulty.

I'm starting to think I have the wrong hobby.

Time Played - 58 Minutes Did I finish it? - I barely started it. Would I finish it? - No. Less than an hour into this thing I wanted to scream at someone, so I can't imagine what actually trying to play this monstrosity seriously would be like. Hell, I didn't even want to load it back up to take bloody screenshots.